Appeals court: First Amendment protects forum trolls too

Anonymous forum posters are allowed to rant their heads off as long as they're …

Anonymous trolls on the Internet are allowed to remain anonymous, a judge in a California appeals court ruled yesterday. Not only that, but they're allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights and speak their minds, no matter how scathing their comments may be. The court opinion reversed a previous decision that would have allowed Lisa Krinsky, COO of a Florida-based drug service company, to subpoena 10 anonymous Yahoo message board posters' real names.

The story starts out like this. 10 anonymous individuals posted on Yahoo's message boards in 2005 about Krinsky, her company (SFBC), and two other officers at her company. These posters regularly made what the judge described as "scathing verbal attacks" against these officers. This included referring to the trio as "a management consisting of boobs, losers and crooks," and with one poster (Doe 6) describing Krinsky when he said "I will reciprocate felatoin [sic] with Lisa even though she has fat thighs, a fake medical degree, 'queefs' and has poor feminine hygiene."

Krinsky left SFBC in December of 2005 and filed the lawsuit in January of 2006, which Doe 6 attempted to quash. In April of 2006, a superior court judge said that Doe 6 was "trying to drive down the price of [plaintiff's] company to manipulate the stock price, sell it short and so forth," according to court documents seen by Ars. The court also suggested that "[a]ccusing a woman of unchastity [...] calling somebody a crook . . . saying that they have a fake medical degree, accusing someone of a criminal act, accusing someone—impinging [sic] their integrity to practice in their chosen profession historically have been libel per se." The court then denied Doe 6's motion to quash.

The appeals court acknowledged that the Wild West of the Internet is still bound by rules about libel, and that especially in the corporate and financial arena, people's reputations and entire companies can suffer damages as rumors spread over the 'Net. Still, the judge ruled that what Doe 6 had posted were not assertions of "actual fact" and therefore not actionable under Florida's defamation law, despite being "unquestionably offensive and demeaning." Therefore, Doe 6's statements are still protected under the First Amendment, and he is entitled to all costs involved in his appeal.

The decision comes just weeks after two Yale law students were dealt a similar blow in their own case against anonymous forum bashers. They had filed a lawsuit against a number of anonymous posters on AutoAdmit.com who were advocating that others physically assault, rape, and sodomize them if at all possible. The two plaintiffs, however, were unable to get the IP addresses of these posters and have therefore been largely unsuccessful in identifying them. While the attacks made by the AutoAdmit posters may or may not be legally protected (they are threats, after all), we will likely never find out thanks to vigorous data deletion policies.